In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of digital media available online. Services, such as Apple's iTunes® for example, enable users to legally purchase and download music. Other services, such as Yahoo!® Music Unlimited and RealNetwork's Rhapsody®, provide access to millions of songs for a monthly subscription fee. YouTube® provides users access to video media. As a result, media items have become much more accessible to consumers worldwide. Due to the large amount of the accessible digital media, recommendation technologies are emerging as an important enabler to assist users in identifying and navigating large databases of available media. Recommendations are useful to help users identify and select media items of interest for usage and/or play.
Recommendations may be programmatically-generated by a company based on the user's predefined preferences and/or profiles. Recommendations also may be provided by other users. Particularly, the users may be peers on a social network. The social network provides for the exchange of media item recommendations among the users. As such, the user on the social network may be both a recommender user of media items to other users and a recipient user of media item recommendations from other users. In this manner, the user may receive a media item recommendation from another user and transmit a media item recommendation to other users.
Typically, the users on the social network have some type of relationship. For example, the users may be friends, acquaintances, or members of a defined group or community. Because of these relationships, the users may have similar traits, profiles, likes and dislikes, and/or media item preferences. Therefore, the social networks provide an opportunity to develop and strengthen the interaction between the users not only with respect to the media items, but also with respect to the users personally. The development and strengthening of the user interaction promotes the continued use of the social network for media item recommendations and the acquisition and playing of the media items recommended.
Promoting the use of the social network could be better accomplished if the media item recommendation included additional information of the recommender incorporated into the media item recommendation. The additional information may provide personal information of the recommender and/or information about the recipient, the media item, or the artist. In addition, if the recipient had the flexibility to display the personal information at the times and on the devices as desired by the recipient, it would increase the recipient's enjoyment, education, and entertainment.
However, current media item recommendation applications do not allow the recommender to include personal information in a media item recommendation or the recipient to display the personal information at times and on devices as desired by the recipient. Accordingly, a need exists for a media item recommendation system and method that allows a recipient to receive a media item recommendation that includes personal information and to display the personal information at times and on devices as desired.